Message to Paula Findlay: You have no reason to apologize

Paula Findlay of Canada crosses the women's triathlon finish line in tears at the London 2012 Olympic Games, August 04, 2012.

Photograph by: Jean Levac
, Postmedia Olympic Team

LONDON - I was at the track, watching Oscar Pistorius, about the time that Paula Findlay, sobbing, made her way across the finish line in the triathlon.

As he was in the starter's blocks for his 400-metre heat, she was about 10 minutes into the last leg of the gruelling triad of this event, the 10K run.

As he was making history, she was gutting it out through the toughest two hours and change of her athletic life.

As he was making his way slowly through the mixed zone for endless interviews about his marvellous accomplishment, Findlay was apologizing to Canadians for letting down the side.

“I'm so sorry to everyone in Canada,” she said.

These are the two sides to the Olympic coin: one glory, one despair.

It is often mysterious what separates the one from the other; the scientists of sport know more than ever before, but not enough. All they and we really know is that the physical gap is often tiny - millimetres, seconds, minutes at most - and the emotional one vast.

At one point there in the mixed zone - it is the gauntlet athletes must run as they come off the playing field, where they are interrogated, often inanely, by Olympic rights-holders first and the lowly written press next - I heard that Findlay had finished dead last. At some later point I saw a picture of her, weeping.

I wished I'd been at Hyde Park for the finish. I wished I could have told her what I know to be true, that she has nothing to be sorry for, to apologize for, nothing even to explain, that she makes her countrymen proud. She is Oscar and he is her - world-class athletes, but more than that, fine people.

A long, long time ago, when I was covering my first Olympics in Innsbruck, Canadians rarely fared as well as they do now. Sometimes they would be savaged back home as failures. It was tricky, sometimes, finding happy stories in a 37th-place finish, but they weren't failures back then, and they certainly aren't now.

There is no money for most Canadian athletes; it's a financial struggle, albeit one that is getting better than it was. But still, no one gets rich and no one does it to get rich. They juggle jobs and school and go begging to keep doing their sport. They take unpaid sabbaticals; parents help out, spouses suck it up another four years; kids get used to one parent being away, training, for 200 days a year.

There's little of the glory, too. That's reserved for the very few, the lucky few, who win or those whose triumphs, like Pistorius's, are so naked and so shining they can't be ignored.

Even then, even for the few, it's a quick bloody thing, a passing fancy most of the time.

I watched last week the winners of the men's eights at the rowing basin.

The three teams paddled over to the podium dock, got out of their boats, stood and got their medals and flowers, and were ushered out and into their boats so the next race could start. That's how fast it happens.

Next year, big Malcolm Howard, the Canadian captain who with his band of brothers won silver, can walk down virtually any street in the country and no one will know who he is. Ditto Ryan Cochrane, Canada's ferocious young swimmer, and just about all the rest of them.

They do it because they love it. It's not a sacrifice, but a calling, and those who love them indulge it. Classic values are the underpinnings: Hard bloody work, unsung, for years, usually done in ignominy; the satisfaction of giving your all, of sore muscles and weary heads and lonely laps in the pool and long runs at dawn.

They aren't that different from the rest of us, either, which is probably why we watch and why we feel their strong emotions even from a television distance. I need reminding of that, now and then. In the criminal courts, which is my usual beat, you can grow dubious about human nature.

I said something like that the other day to Adam van Koeverden, that it must be hard when he's in the real world, where people don't try as hard or give as much. He disagreed.

(He used writing as a comparison, because that's what I do and he's polite. But he clearly meant it more broadly, to include all sorts of work.) “I think a lot of people push themselves,” he said. “People you might recognize because they're good at what they do. I don't think there's a big difference between writing and paddling at the end of the day. You sit down, you're inspired, you motivate yourself and you do your job every day. I use one muscle and you guys use a different one.”

He's right, I think, but there remains something special about sport, and the men and women who do it. Part of it is the inordinate discipline they must bring to everything they do; part of it is that they're young, to be so wise. And their failures are so dramatic, so public.

Sometime Saturday, a smart friend of mine back in Toronto, Tracy Nesdoly, was watching Paula Findlay's race. She wrote me a note, and what she said was this: “There's something noble about being last and still making yourself finish, when you just want to stop and cry. Seems big and human to me.”

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